


This Tornado Loves You

by RoseisaRoseisaRose



Series: Married Life (theme from Up plays) [1]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Avert your eyes, F/M, Fluff, Married Life, Post Game, also they kiss a couple times, and hold hands, fluff on fluff on fluff, in which felix tries to get annette to take a nap, so you know, that's just the plot, that's not an innuendo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:55:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23302756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseisaRoseisaRose/pseuds/RoseisaRoseisaRose
Summary: Annette has been a civilian for eighteen months, married for half a year, and Trying Her Best for her entire darn life. Felix has been a duke for two years, a husband for six months, and deeply concerned about Annette for about as long as he’s known her.This is about the day all of these things collide.
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Series: Married Life (theme from Up plays) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1742692
Comments: 22
Kudos: 134





	This Tornado Loves You

Annette Fantine Fraldarius was missing.

That was, perhaps, a melodramatic way of putting it. Felix wasn’t _worried_ or anything, she just wasn’t in the places she was supposed to be.

That was also the wrong way of putting it. She wasn’t _supposed_ to be anywhere; she was his wife, not a servant. She just wasn't where he would have imagined.

She was his wife. That was also hard to imagine.

And she was missing. That was the important matter at hand.

He knew she wasn’t in the training grounds, because he’d spent all morning in the training grounds. The war still loomed fresh in his memories – the year and a half anniversary was coming up, he’d remembered absently that morning – but he could feel his reflexes slowing down by fractions of seconds. He lived or died by fractions of seconds. Or he had. It was strange to think that wasn’t the case anymore. So he’d spent all morning at the training grounds, shaving off the fractions, and he hadn’t seen Annette.

He went to the library first, after he’d left the training yard and found a new shirt and laid his sword aside with only a momentary twinge of concern. The library was usually where Annette spent her mornings, tucked away at a desk surrounded by piles of books that she seemed to read three at a time – simultaneously, not consecutively. Felix had felt guilty when he first showed her the library at Castle Fraldarius. They were a family of action, not intellect. Although Felix had scoffed at the training grounds at Garreg Mach when he’d first arrived, sixteen and stupid and ready to scoff at just about anything, he had worried that Annette would grow instantly bored with everything Fraldarius when she saw their library only had one story.

“At least it’s less to clean?” he’d suggested hesitantly when he first walked her into the library. “A smaller explosion?’

She’d punched him in the shoulder for that. But she hadn’t gotten bored yet

Or maybe she had, because she certainly wasn’t there today. Half a dozen books lay spread across the desk he knew she liked best, and there was parchment with meticulous notes in her looping cursive. She had undoubtedly been here recently, but neither the books nor the notes offered Felix any clue to her present whereabouts – or to anything else, as it all seemed to be written in some combination of math and dead languages that Felix had never managed to attain in his own magic studies.

He squinted at the notes, trying to make sense of them. He’d been pretty decent at casting offensive spells by the time they’d marched on Enbarr, but Annette was on a whole other level. A mystifying level. Last week she had excitedly explained the ramifications of some discovery she’d made to him over dinner and for once in their lives he was the one who took too long to finish the soup course because he kept having to interrupt to try to clarify what she was talking about. This research could have something to do with that. He felt equally confused when he looked at it, and judging from the occasional bursts of slanted, frantic writing across the parchment, Annette had the same unbridled excitement when she worked on it.

Felix wondered if he’d barely missed her, and briefly considered waiting in the library until she inevitably returned – Annette wasn’t the type to leave a problem only half-solved. But he only lasted a few minutes, slung over the arm of a nearby couch and languidly staring at her notes to try to understand them, before his impatience got the better of him and he decided to try to track her down elsewhere.

It was a nice enough day that he tried the gardens, even though the winter chill generally kept Annette inside unless she knew his jacket was around to steal. The flowers were dormant for the season, although the gardeners worked hard to keep the wide assortment of evergreen trees and general shrubbery presentable. Annette kept a small plot of dirt in the back corner of the north garden, where she had unsuccessfully attempted to grow plants from Duscur the summer before. She was undaunted by how stubbornly the flowers resisted Fraldarius soil, and she had written a flurry of letters to Dedue. The replies had been extensive, and Felix could only imagine the man was patiently and carefully considering her dilemma with a thoroughness that Felix found dizzying. Still, by autumn she seemed armed with enough contingency plans to grow Duscur flowers out of a sheer rockface if need be, and she often dragged Felix to the that particular garden when the walked in the evenings so she could double check her work and remind herself of her theoretical preparations.

But she wasn’t there right now. Felix absently kicked the plot of dirt with the toe of his boot. He’d done greenhouse duty out of obligation; he never picked up a knack for anything other than watering and weeding. Annette seemed to love nothing more than following Dedue or Ashe around the greenhouse, asking follow-up questions at a mile a minute as she clumsily balanced all the gardening supplies they might need. Since their wedding, Felix had counted twenty-seven separate songs related to gardening. Absolutely none of them gave him any insight to how she coaxed life out of the cold, dead ground beneath his boot. But he hadn’t really learned all the lyrics to at least half of them. He still had time.

Walking by the main study where Annette was most likely to be doing official paperwork and consultation was a trickier business, as there were bound to be plenty of advisors wandering in and out of that room, as well, and Felix was eager not to be roped into another discussion of local policy. He knew Annette tended to take over the bulk of the day-to-day processing and paperwork when he was traveling on Kingdom business, but he doubted she would be doing that today, as his next trip to Fhirdiad was weeks away. Still, if his advisors had failed to find him, perhaps they’d stolen her away to finalize some awful trade deal or settle some border dispute. He peeked through the door, scanning the room for a telltale flash of red hair, but only saw two distinctly not-Annette figures, blessedly with their backs to him. He slipped away as quietly as possible and jogged down the hallway, holding his breath as if he might jinx it and have to compose a treaty if he breathed too loud.

He finally found her in the kitchens.

Well, he found a trail of flour in the kitchens, which he followed. The flour trail started at a central counter with too many baking supplies and a rectangle pan that contained _something_ blackened and still vaguely smoldering. Felix didn’t stop to investigate, instead following the flour from the counter, past the ovens, around the corner, and to a back row of shelves that contained all the pantry staples a baker could ever want.

Annette was sitting with her back against a large container of brown sugar, hugging her knees to her chest. It wasn’t that she was covered head-to-toe with flour so much as it was that she had managed to incorporate flour into her outfit so extensively that it had long surpassed accent and moved into motif. She looked up at the sound of footsteps coming around the corner, then looked down when she saw it was Felix – but not before he could spot that she’d been crying, or at least sniffling, tucked away against the brown sugar in the corner of the kitchen. She tried to subtly wipe at her eyes and flour streaked across her cheeks. Felix wordlessly walked over and took a seat next to her, sitting cross-legged in front of a container of white sugar. He looked over at her, strangely shy for a moment.

“Hi,” he said finally.

She looked over at him with mournful, deer-wide eyes, and he resisted the urge to brush flour from the tip of her nose. She dropped her eyes and looked away and Felix tried to act like he didn’t see her bottom lip quiver before she broke eye contact.

“How long have you been back here?” he asked after a beat of silence.

“I don’t know,” she said ruefully. “Is there still smoke coming off that stupid cake?”

So it was a cake. “A little, yeah, I guess,” he said, not sure if it was better to downplay it or oversell it.

She sniffled, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand again. Felix wondered if the flour was going to agitate her eyes and make the crying worse. “Not long, then,” she said.

They sat like that in silence for a while, Annette staring at the floor and Felix trying to figure out a place to stare. He was bad at this, when he knew he should say something but didn’t know what to say. Annette was, conversely, amazing at saying the right thing at the right time to the right person. She made best friends out of random strangers, fell into old conversation patterns with their former classmates as if no time had passed, coaxed more genuine laughs out of Felix on a daily basis than he had thought was actually possible. He could surely think of something, anything to say to her to start the conversation, instead of sitting next to her in silence like an awkward, uncertain fool.

“You’re covered in flour,” he finally told her.

He wondered if she could still annul the marriage half a year after the fact.

“I dropped the bag while trying to get it from the shelf,” she mumbled, her face pressed against her knees. “Why would anyone put it that high up, anyways?”

Felix suspected that “that high up” for Annette was “a reasonable elevation” for any of the kitchen staff, but didn’t say this. Instead, he reached forward and brushed some of the flour from the side of Annette’s face that he could see clearly. She turned her head to face him at this, still curled up against herself with her knees to her chest but at least maintaining eye contact for the first time that day.

“I thought you’d be in the library,” Felix said. “I looked for you.”

Annette shrugged slightly, and tiny cascades of flour appeared around her for a brief moment. “I was for a bit this morning; I got up early,” she said, which Felix knew, although he’d been mostly asleep when she’d left the room that morning and hadn’t even wished her a proper good morning before she was gone. Annette continued, “But I was too excited to concentrate – Mercie promised to send me this cake recipe months ago, when we were last all at Fhirdiad for that whatsit council and we all went out to dinner, you know. But it took forever for her to finally send it.”

“Oh,” said Felix, a master of conversation. After a pause, he added, “What kind of cake is it?”

“Cinnamon cake,” she said sadly. “With cream cheese frosting.”

It sounded awful. “That sounds good,” Felix said encouragingly.

Annette’s face crumpled so fast that Felix had an irrational flash of panic that she could read minds and knew what a liar he was.

“It _does_ sound good,” she wailed, dropping her arms from her knees and grabbing Felix’s arm, pulling him forward in a way that almost threw him off balance. “It sounds so good and Mercie said it’s the easiest thing in the world and I was so excited to try it and it turned out _horribly_ and I’ve wasted my entire morning and ruined the kitchen and no one wants to eat a stupid burnt frostingless cake and _it’s your birthday_.” She drew in a deep breath that was somewhere between a sob and just honestly needing oxygen – she hadn’t paused at any point in her tirade – drew away from Felix, covering her face with her hands.

Felix’s eyes widened in panic, even more as he reached a hand out towards her and she reflexively ducked away from him, pulling herself deeper into her self-made perfect spiral. He settled a hand on the back of her hair, absently brushing flour from her, and she didn’t pull away, but she didn’t look up, either. He sighed to himself – no, not to himself, _at_ himself. He’d been so busy with politics and territories and the stupid, pointless minutiae of the Dukedom that he’d completely forgotten that his birthday was –

No. Wait.

No he hadn’t.

“Annette,” he said gently, trying to coax her back towards him with just his voice. “My birthday isn’t for another two weeks.”

Annette raised her head and looked at him, frowning slightly, as if he were being frustratingly dumb right now. Maybe he was. “I know that,” she said, her voice slightly defensive even if she looked completely dejected right now. “Two weeks from tomorrow. But it’s our first time celebrating your birthday together, and I didn’t want to mess anything up –”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t . . . . mess anything up,” Felix realized how stupid this sentence was, given the blackened and smoking cake lying on the counter not 4 feet away from them, but he couldn’t stop himself in time. Annette’s frown became a look of pity. Annoyed, annoyed pity. “I don’t even like cake that much,” he said in his defense.

“You might have liked this one,” Annette said softly, and Felix could only imagine the perfect cake she had concocted in her head as she planned this, and how it compared to the one on the counter currently. “But I’m not going to have time to try it again. I’ve wasted all of today, and we have to finalize those land agreements by next week and I haven’t even looked them yet, and Hilda wants to come stay here on her way home from Fhirdiad in a fortnight, and I still haven’t finished writing your present and I’m never going to have time for that, and everything is just going wrong today, Felix.”

“I thought the cake was the present,” Felix said, trying to keep up with Annette’s to-do list.

“The cake is the cake,” Annette explained helpfully. “The present is the present.”

“What’s the present, then?”

“None of your business.”

“Why are you ‘writing’ it?”

“None of your _business_.”

“Is it a song?”

“I’m not telling you; you’re terrible at surprises.” Annette scowled at him, and Felix was briefly, stupidly excited that he had a birthday coming up for the first time that he could remember. He quickly remembered the cake, however, and all excitement died. It wasn’t so much that he wished he had never been born as it was that he wished he didn’t have a birthday attached to it, so that Annette could take a break for once and not worry about his birthday.

Felix looked at Annette, with her scowl and her red-rimmed eyes and the flour coming off of her every time she moved too quickly. He felt a pang of guilt as he mentally tallied the places he’d expected her to be – studying and drafting policy and gardening and never, ever stopping. He tried to remember the last time Annettte had read a book for fun, or played with one of the palace cats, or gone to bed early. He couldn’t. He was a Duke and he couldn’t get his wife a kitten to play with or an afternoon off, and yet she was the one who felt guilty for ruining a birthday that had not happened yet.

“Maybe,” he said slowly. “You should take a break for the rest of the day.”

“A break from what?” Annette scoffed. “I’m sitting on our kitchen floor feeling sorry for myself, Felix, I’m not exactly negotiating sweeping peace agreements.”

“If you like sitting on the kitchen floor feeling sorry for yourself, I guess that works,” Felix said. “But maybe do something that makes you feel better?”

“Nothing’s going to make me feel better,” Annette lamented, leaning back dramatically against his hand, which he was still unhurriedly running through her hair. “I’ve ruined everything,” she concluded.

There was a long pause. Felix brought his hand around to rest alongside her chin, and she looked over at him again, glumly.

“Would less flour help?” Felix asked.

Annette glanced down at her dress, at her arms, at the residual flour that now clung to Felix’s hand as he pulled away from her. “Less flour might help,” she finally admitted.

“Come on, let’s get you changed out of those clothes,” Felix said, holding his hand out to help her up.

Annette didn’t take his hand. “I can do that later,” she said with a slight pout. Felix never knew if he wanted to kiss her more when she smiled or when she pouted. She drew in against herself before he could try any test cases in the moment. “I need to sit here and think about all the mistakes I made with that cake, first,” she added.

“Why don't you think about all the mistakes you made with that cake,” Felix said, sliding his hand into hers, “ _while_ you change out of these clothes.”

Annette instinctively wrapped her fingers around Felix’s, even though she wasn’t paying any attention to how he had been inching closer to her since the conversation began. “I don’t want to do that, Felix, I’ll get distracted,” she said. “I need to focus.”

“I’ll come with you and you can tell me,” Felix said. “I’m a very difficult man to distract.” He tugged her hand towards him and Annette fell against him easily, as if gravity moved them together rather than downwards, as if that was the way she’d been leaning all along.

“You are, are you?” she said skeptically, tilting her chin to look at him. She was definitely pouting now. Felix settled for kissing her nose, as the flour was still distractingly bright at the center of her face. Her pout faded into something curious and searching as he pulled away, and Felix wondered how much flour had landed on his own face. He was sure it was completely transferred to his clothes at this point; Annette was practically sitting in his lap.

She blinked at him a few times, and then took a deep breath. “I mixed up baking soda and baking powder,” she said hurriedly. “And I thought it said tablespoon when it said teaspoon.”

“Off to a terrible start,” Felix said cheerfully. Annette pulled away from him in an overblown huff, her fingers still curled in his. It was remarkably tempting to pull her forward once more, but her earlier skepticism stung. He wasn’t easily distracted. He could hear her out.

Felix got to his feet, pulling Annette up after him. She stumbled slightly and he caught her with his other hand, steadying her. “Baking powder is not baking soda,” he recited back to her, a lesson learned. “What else?”

She spent the entire walk up the stairs and down the hallways and through various sets of double doors telling him about the recipe. How Mercie had told her about it; how Sylvain had loved it more than anything and they were all sure Felix would like it too; how the first set of directions got lost in the mail somehow, and it was weird that happened, Mercie’s handwriting was so good, that never happens; how Annette needed to clarify at least a quarter of the directions because Mercie liked to quantify things by saying “a pinch” or “a good stir” and that just wasn’t _accurate_ , Felix.

Felix nodded and frowned and wished he was better at making affirming noises as he opened doors and guided elbows and caught Annette before she even knew she was tripping up the stairs. He’d already located the fundamental problem with this cake, which was that there was absolutely no way he’d like a cake just because Sylvain did, but he didn’t think that was the lesson Annette wanted him to take away from her preamble, so he wordlessly pushed her towards the bathtub in their bedroom suite, instead.

“I think the cake would have been okay, maybe, although I don’t think cake batter is supposed to have the consistency of muffin batter and the directions did say ‘pour’ into a pan and it wasn’t pouring,” Annette said.

“Huh,” Felix offered. He rolled his sleeve up and tested the bathwater with his elbow. It didn’t seem too hot, and Annette could handle higher temperatures than him, anyways.

“Mercie just said to add confectioner’s sugar until the frosting was the ‘right consistency.’ How much is that! What’s the consistency of frosting? If you can only tell when you’ve added too much, then you’ve already added too much!” Annette said.

“Why does this dress have so many buttons? How do you get out of it?” Felix muttered as he fiddled with the buttons at the back of her neck.

“And I’m trying to whisk it and the frosting has, like, hardened, but I thought maybe if I just whisked hard enough that would loosen it up. But I didn’t have a good enough grip on the bowl and it flew off the counter and shattered,” Annette said.

“Mm,” Felix agreed. He handed her a bar of soap as she scooped water over her shoulders. The soap smelled like roses, or maybe like lavender. Felix never was able to keep the two apart.

The soap smelled like her, mostly.

“So by the time I found the broom, and swept up the glass, and healed the cut on my finger, and swept again just in case because broken glass is super dangerous, the cake had been in the oven for over an hour. And by the time I remembered – Felix, I keep my dresses in the closet,” Annette interrupted herself.

Felix looked up and through the doorway, where Annette was perched on the edge of the tub with a fluffy pink towel wrapped around her. He was kneeling by the dresser against the wall, so he had to crane his neck to see her.

“I know that,” he said, just a hint of a grumble in his reply. He’d evidently mixed up “tea dresses” with “ball gowns” _one_ time and Annette now thought he was an idiot. Even worse, he still wasn’t sure what a tea dress was. He held up the two nightgowns she wore most often. “Pink or blue?” he asked impassively.

“I’m not going to bed, it’s like one o’clock in the afternoon,” Annette said indignantly.

Felix settled on blue, since she wasn’t making a decision. He stood up. “You don’t have to sleep if you don't want to,” he said. “You could stare out the window or write a new song or something.”

Annette frowned at him. “There’s too much to do for me to lounge around all day, Felix,” she said. “I left all those dishes in the kitchen, I’ve made _such_ a mess of things.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Felix cut her off before she could start another litany of mistakes. “Dinner’s not for hours; I have time.”

“I have to write to Lysithea today; I’ve been putting that letter off for weeks,” Annette said, barely listening to him. “And I think I miscalculated the funds for next week’s defense council, so I wanted to check my work. And I wasted so much time this morning that I’m at least two chapters behind on –”

“Catch,” said Felix. He tossed the nightgown squarely at her, and she caught it without thinking, dropping her towel in the process.

“ _Fe-lix_ ,” she scolded, blushing furiously as she clamored into the nightgown, although Felix didn’t know why – she seemed perfectly confident when she was pulling it in the other direction; more confident than he’d managed to feel in the last six months.

Felix followed after her as she walked past him, grabbing a large blanket from the top of a low hope chest they kept at the foot of the bed. Annette cast a glance at her closet full of dresses and look back at Felix, who glared at her disapprovingly. She giggled slightly and clamored onto the bed as Felix shook the blanket out – he’d never thought the bed particularly high until Annette had moved in, but it was practically a leap to the floor for her to get out of bed in the mornings, which Annette took to be a rather amusing game and Felix took to be another reminder that the grandeur of nobility was useless at best.

Annette looked up expectantly at Felix as he threw the comforter over the bed with a dramatic flick of his wrists and smoothed the edges down around her. He almost missed the meaning when she didn’t lie back down, and was prepared to argue again that an afternoon nap wouldn’t hurt _anyone_ Annette, but he finally took the hint when she leaned towards him, and he bent down to kiss her on the forehead before leaving her to go do whatever paperwork she would have tried to do on her own.

Annette grasped his elbows as he leaned into the kiss and, before he could pull away, tugged at him with unexpected force so that Felix fell forward onto the bed. She pushed at his shoulder and he rolled onto his back next to her, glancing over at her with a look of surprise.

“Take your shoes off, they’ve got mud on them,” she told him, her tone equal parts genteel and authoritative in a way that he had seen eviscerate minor lords who thought they stood a chance against her in formal negotiations.

Felix spluttered at a reply, which combined arguments that it wasn’t _his_ fault his shoes were on the bed; that she was the one who needed a nap, not him; that he also had a ton of things to do today; and that she could have just asked instead of throwing him around like a sack of potatoes. None of those extremely good arguments cohered, however, so he only got through a few disconnected words of each before she looked at him with widening blue eyes and he stopped talking altogether.

“You’ll stay, right?” she asked. “Just until I fall asleep?”

All his words lost, Felix nodded wordlessly.

He pulled his boots off and tossed them across the room. They landed haphazardly by a line of Annette’s shoes, neatly paired off along the edge of the wall. One boot knocked against a pair of low heels and jostled them sideways, and Felix winced, wondering if he should go straighten it before Annette noticed and tried to fix it herself. A soft sight behind him derailed that inner debate, and he looked back. Annette had pulled the blanket around her protectively, staring up at the ceiling with one arm propped underneath her head.

Felix settled back against the pillow propped up along the back of the headboard. Looking over at Annette, he nudged her slightly with his foot. She startled out of her ceiling reverie and looked back to him, and then folded herself against him, resting her head against his chest as he settled an arm around her shoulder and carelessly traced embroidered pattern on her nightgown with his other hand. He wondered, suddenly, if he was now the one getting flour everywhere, if she was going to be cross when she pulled away and found herself dusted once more. But Annette was too tangled up against him for him to really fix that problem now.

“Promise you’ll wake me up in 20 minutes,” Annette said, running her hand across him to grab at his opposite shoulder like he was some sort of oversized teddy bear.

“No,” Felix replied, shifting to get comfortable as Annette settled against him. “You’re grumpy when I wake you up.”

“This was _your idea_ , villain,” Annette said, and she already sounded sleepy. “I’m writing to Lysithea and to Hilda before dinner, and if there’s time I really am going to go over those budget numbers, I think I forgot to carry the one somewhere.”

“Have you ever thought,” Felix asked, trying to think how to say it delicately. “That maybe you work too much?”

Annette stiffened in his arms. He hadn’t said it delicately, then. She shot him a look, squirming underneath him to get the best angle for indignant glares. “The kingdom’s in unstable times, Felix, you of all people know that,” she said accusingly. “Dimitri can’t do it on his own, we’ve all got to do our best to help him.”

Felix could feel a muscle in his jaw twitch at this; he still remembered Annette’s ill-fated Do Your Best campaign at the officer’s academy, which had resulted in her collapsing from exhaustion during a routine mission. She’d spent a week in the infirmary and earned a strict lecture from Professor Byleth that Felix still didn’t understand from a pedagogical standpoint, as it only seemed to make her try harder. Felix still remembered the horror of watching Dimitri carry her off the battlefield to safety, as well as the strange, novel feeling of guilt that had kept him from falling asleep as he ticked off all the ways someone stronger could have kept her from getting hurt.

“Don’t glower like that, you know I’m right,” Annette scolded gently, and Felix realized he’d tightened his arms around her without realizing it. He loosened his grip, moving a hand up to play with the ends of her vaguely-damp hair.

Felix knew better to say that if the Boar couldn’t lead without Annette doing Her Best, he didn’t deserve to be king. “Okay,” he said instead. “Maybe you could take a break in the mornings? Surely the kingdom can survive if you study for two hours instead of four.”

“I don’t do that for the kingdom, I do that for me, silly,” Annette said. “I like it, it’s fun.”

“It stresses you out.”

“It’s fun.”

“Maybe less work in the gardens, then?” Felix was losing this battle badly; this was his last resort. “I assure you Fraldarius gardeners are perfectly capable of getting you whatever flowers you want.”

“They can’t get _Duscur_ flowers, though,” Annette said, with a matter-of-fact certainty that implied she’d settled the conversation.

She had not. Felix scrunched his nose as he glanced down at her. “That’s not their fault; it’s a completely different climate. You’ve never even been to Duscur, why do you like their flowers so much?” He was being needlessly combative, maybe, but it slightly irked him that she wanted something and he couldn’t get it for her. Even if the thing she wanted was ridiculous.

She looked back at him with her eyes widening, and he lost his train of annoyance. “I’m not doing that for _me_ , I’m doing it for _us_ ,” she said. She reached up and brushed a piece of hair behind his ear absently. “Don’t you think it would be a nice reminder when we walk by them?”  
  


“A . . . reminder?” Felix repeated. Blankly.

“You don’t remember?” Annette said softly. When he gave no reply, she pulled back, sitting up to look at him more fully. “That day in the greenhouse, when you asked me to sing, when you told me you were my –”

“I remember that,” said Felix, feeling the blush creep up his neck. “Goddess knows I’ve tried to forget it.” He still had no idea why those were the words that had come out of his mouth, when he’d wanted to tell her that she was steadiness and optimism and sunshine and life and all he had managed to do was babble on about her singing, a topic he knew for a fact annoyed her.

Still, it had evidently worked, and now Annette giggled slightly, and brushed at his hair again, and let her fingers linger. “Don’t you remember where we were standing?” she asked again. “The flowers you were hiding by?”

“I wasn’t hiding,” Felix said automatically, and Annette ignored him.

“I can’t believe you don't remember,” she said. “It took Dedue months to figure out how to grow those properly!”

“I wasn’t looking at flowers in the greenhouse that day, Annette,” Felix said, and he didn’t know what was in his voice that made her lose focus, but he could tell from her suddenly flushed cheeks and the fraction of hesitation in her fingers against his cheek that she was losing focus.

She pulled her hands back, redirected her attention, placed her fists against her hips in performative annoyance. “That’s no excuse!” she said, and now she was the one who was babbling. “You and I worked in the greenhouse at least once a week. You saw the flowers all the time!”

“You don’t get it,” Felix said, pushing himself up so he met her eye level and then raised above it slightly. “I _never_ looked at the flowers in the greenhouse.”

The sound Annette made as she looked at him was somewhere between an “oh” and a squeak, and a blush spread across her face. “What were you looking at, then?” she asked, and Felix felt it was rather unfair that she was the one who had squeaked and yet he was the one who was having trouble maintaining eye contact.

“If I tell you, will you promise to stop worrying about baking cakes and writing letters and whatever else for an hour and take a nap or something?” Felix asked. He was not easily distracted. He could focus on the matter at hand.

Annette raised an eyebrow. “I don't see what I get from that deal,” she said. “Considering I think I already know the answer to that.”

“No?” Felix said. “What do you want instead, then?”

Annette leaned forward, looping her hands around his shoulders. “I think _you_ already know the answer to _that_ ,” she murmured. And when she kissed him, it was both surprising and inevitable, as if he’d never kissed her before this moment and as if this was the only place he’d truly felt at home. Felix fell back against the pillows and Annette followed after him and there was that strange, intoxicating confidence again, although somewhere in the back of Felix’s mind, he realized as he felt her pulse against his that this was kind of the opposite effect from what he’d suggested initially.

It was Annette who finally pulled back, however, bracing her elbow against a pillow and arching back from him far too soon. “You said you were going to clean up the kitchen,” she said, her voice slightly dazed, her eyes unfocused. “I – that cake is going to take _forever_ to scrub out of the pan if we leave out too long.”

Felix closed his eyes and did not roll them. The cake mattered to Annette. He could acknowledge the cake mattered to Annette.

“I hate that stupid cake,” he whispered.

He could _maybe_ acknowledge the cake mattered to Annette.

He instantly realized what a stupid thing to say that way, after he’d spent the past forty-five minutes monosyllabically assuring her the cake situation was good, actually. Felix hastily opened one eye to assess the damage, but Annette’s eyes were blessedly free from any of the tears that had been welling in them on and off all afternoon. Instead, she was frowning with a ferocity that bordered on childish, a kind of anger you could only muster when the stakes were absolutely meaningless.

“I hate it, too,” she said angrily, her ire completely directed towards the door and, Felix presumed, the kitchens. As for Felix, Annette grabbed his shoulders suddenly and intently, wordlessly declaring him a comrade in her new anti-cake agenda. “I hate that stupid cake and I hate that stupid recipe and I love Mercie but I hate your _stupid birthday_ , Felix.”

“Hey now,” Felix said, reaching up to her cheek and brushing off flour that was now only in his memory. “That’s a little hasty. At least wait the two weeks, you know?”

Annette gave him a look that he remembered from of their earliest conversations – a veiled fear that he was making fun of her, that she was the last one in on the joke. Felix let his smile (if you could call it that) fade and slid his hand up to more fully cup her cheek in a gesture that he hoped indicated sincerity. Annette leaned slightly into it, which was better than calling him evil and running out of the room, so he chalked this up as victory.

“I know, Felix, I just –” she cut herself off and started over. “I'm just so tired.”

“I know,” said Felix, jostling her hand with his shoulder slightly and moving his hand to the back of her neck to draw her down towards him. Annette buried her face against his shirt as she settled back down.

“It’s not because I work to much,” she mumbled into his chest.

“I know,” Felix lied.

There was a long pause. And then she added, “We need to go clean up the mess I made in the kitchen.”

“We don’t need to do anything,” Felix said. “It’s my birthday.”

Annette flailed one hand blindly, unsuccessfully trying to whack at his shoulder without actually looking up. Felix caught her hand, kissed her fingertips, and laid it back down against him. She didn’t try to smack him again. She also didn’t bring up the cake anymore.

They stayed like that for a long time. Felix did actually want to keep his word about cleaning up the kitchen, but the pillows were comfortable and Annette’s breathing was steady and dinner wasn’t for a long time. He glanced down at Annette and her eyes were slowly blinking closed, and he wasn’t sure if she was still fighting sleep or if she just wasn’t able to find it.

“Hey,” he said quietly, she tilted her head – not enough to look at him, but enough to show she listening.

“Mm?” she breathed.

“For my birthday, instead of a cake, do you want to like . . . do something? Go somewhere?”

“Where?” she asked, and her voice seemed further away than it had before.

“I don’t know,” Felix said. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. “Just anywhere. Somewhere, um. Somewhere nice.”

This was going great.

Annette smiled sleepily and nuzzled her face more firmly into him. “That sounds, um, nice,” she parroted back at him with the ghost of a sleepy giggle at the back of her voice. She probably wouldn’t remember they even had this conversation.

Felix listened to her breathing grow steadier against him and tried to plan a way for this conversation to go better the second time around. He could send a note to Dorothea and Ferdinand and see if there were still boxes available for the Mittelfrank season this time of year. He could see if Ashe had finally opened that bed and breakfast he’d been working on since fall, and if so, what rooms were available. He could maybe figure out a way to sneak into Fhirdiad without anyone knowing, get a room at an inn like a normal traveling couple, finally go to that sweet shop Annette wouldn’t stop telling him about.

His birthday was still two weeks away. He had time. He could ask Annette about it when she woke up.

The cake had stuck to the pan so firmly by the time Felix got around to it that it was extremely tempting to just throw the entire thing out. He settled for humming Annette’s gardening song #18 to himself as he scrubbed and trying to remember what Duscur flowers looked like, so he could recognize them when it was finally spring again.

**Author's Note:**

> what would make you believe meeeeeeee 🎵
> 
> I dunno, guys, things are pretty bad out there! Maybe this needed plot, but I have no plot to give, I only have fluff, so here you go. I hope it made the social distancing momentarily more bearable. 
> 
> I've never actually shattered a bowl of frosting while trying to stir, but one time I did throw a jar of pickled beets across my kitchen while trying to open a particularly stubborn lid and that honestly was also pretty bad. All other baking mistakes mistakes mentioned I have personally done, although not all at once. 
> 
> anyways, I like to think they're pretty happy to be married, overall.
> 
> [ Follow me on twitter; I'm always like this.](https://twitter.com/Rose3Writes)


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